Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I thought about it, standing there with the cap of the Haig bottle unscrewed in my hand. It wasn’t hard, once I did think about it. ‘I believe you,’ I said, ‘because I watched you shoot those two men on the golf-course.’

  He said, ‘I only shot one.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You took Edgecombe’s life. It only happened to be Trotter who fired the bullet that killed him.’

  Johnson moved. He removed the cap from my fingers and taking up the bottle of whisky, he set out two glasses and poured. ‘If you will allow me,’ he said. The lower lenses perched, two bald Chads, on the edge of his glass as he lifted it, unsmiling, to toast me. He said, ‘To the Scottish teaching hospitals and all they produce.’

  I let him drink, and sit down, and put his whisky on the table beside him before I asked the question I had forbidden myself until now even to think about. ‘All the time,’ I said, ‘from the beginning, that day in the airport - who was trying to kill Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe?’

  I thought I was ready for anything. I thought no answer he could give would surprise me. Instead he said, ‘You’ve had a month of worry, haven’t you, Beltanno? That was what I had been hoping to save you. You see, no one was trying to kill Bartholomew Edgecombe. You were only intended to believe someone was.’

  ‘Playacting?’ I said helpfully. I wondered if he expected me to believe him this time as well. I said, ‘The arsenic at the airport? The further dose on the plane? Pentecost’s attempt at the Bamboo Conch Club? The attempts to warn me off there and in New York and at Coral Harbour? The attack on me at Miami and the disappearance of your luggage and mine before my notes vanished on Crab Island? Denise’s death? The attempt to blow up Edgecombe on Dolly? The grenade someone threw at his car here that night?

  ‘No one was trying to kill Bart Edgecombe, were they?’ I said with some forgivable sarcasm. ‘Except that someone did kill him, and you did nothing at all to prevent him.’

  ‘We had an industrious week or two, didn’t we?’ said Johnson, his eyebrows raised, his glasses filled with mild contemplation. ‘You and the Mighty Leveller, raking together a scratch and dent sale. Of course I did nothing to stop Bart Edgecombe’s murder that evening. I’d just spent twenty-four hours organizing the whole bloody opera. I couldn’t kill Edgecombe myself: the Royal Academy wouldn’t be happy. Trotter had to do it.’

  ‘He hated both you and Edgecombe,’ I said slowly. ‘Trotter’s plan misfired at the Bamboo Conch Club, but he made sure you wouldn’t catch that waiter, or that if you did, the waiter wouldn’t live to confess. He could have caused all the disasters on Dolly, expecting to make some excuse to disembark before Haven struck her. He saved our lives, but only because he had to save his own. And on the golf-course that night, you fell to his bullet.’

  ‘You’ve killed him,’ Edgecombe had shouted at Trotter. ‘You bloody traitor, you’ve killed Johnson instead.’

  ‘I dare say you thought so,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘It looked like it from every angle but mine. Trotter aimed into the bushes where we both were, but he was actually shooting at Edgecombe. And Edgecombe, who was expecting it, was tough and quick and above all, a splendid opportunist. He ducked when he saw Trotter lift his revolver and, turning, took his own sights. When Trotter fired, Edgecombe fired as well. Of course he thought I was dead. He had just shot me himself, as I looked at him, full in the chest.’

  God bless the drip-dry titanium underwear. I said, ‘He might have chosen your head.’

  Johnson said, ‘I tried not to give him the chance. But it was a risk that had to be taken.’

  I knew my voice had gone flat. I said, ‘You expected Sir Bartholomew some time to turn on you? Your own colleague and agent?’

  He smiled a little, nursing his whisky, but his glasses were bleak as the North Sea in the deepening dusk. He said, ‘Edgecombe and I were on opposite sides from the moment I landed in Nassau. He was a double agent, Beltanno: a man being paid by and cheating both sides. We suspected it, but his other employers had found out for certain. They offered him his life on one condition only. That in return, he delivered them mine.’

  ‘He was to kill you?’ I said. I could not conceive of it. The big, grey-haired pleasant man lying sick in my own private ward.

  ‘He was to kill me. And because he was anxious that on no account shou|d our people ever suspect him, he made an elaborate plan. The attacks were to appear directed at him. The outside world was to believe them accidental; we should gradually come to perceive that it was a personal grudge. And to make sure that we knew, he picked you, Beltanno.’

  ‘Picked me?’ I said.

  ‘He had seen you at the hospital, remember? And been impressed by your efficiency. A forthright and independent young woman, who would have her own views about a sudden attack of food poisoning, and would be likely to act on them. He was in New York. Beltanno, because you were going to be in New York; and Trotter was there as his assistant.’

  ‘And Wallace Brady?’ I asked. I wouldn’t have gone so far if he hadn’t mentioned him already.

  ‘Wallace Brady.” said Johnson with evident enjoyment, ‘is an innocent bystander who likes building bridges and doesn’t think young women are to be trusted with guns in their handbags. He and Krishtof did sterling work in the last lap driving both Trotter and Edgecombe towards the car and into our hands.’

  For a moment, it had appeared to make sense. I said snappishly. ‘But Trotter shot Edgecombe.”

  ‘I should think so.’ said Johnson. ‘After all, Edgecombe had just arranged his own accident and got safely off Dolly without returning as promised to take Trotter off too. I must confess that even if Edgecombe had wanted to come back on board, I had asked Brady not to allow him. A dependable young man. I thought him. All that stuff with the reverse gears.’

  I said. ‘Then you knew already that Edgecombe and Trotter were working together?’

  He had known. I closed the screens and switched on the lamps as he gave me, encapsuled in that cool voice, the true events of that series of days which had ended my medical life.

  To begin with, Edgecombe’s reports were already troubling his masters. Slight omissions, slight inaccuracies had led to Johnson’s presence in this part of the world, planned for two months to appear to coincide with an exhibition in Miami: a fortuitous visit which would allow him to call on Edgecombe in passing and judge for himself what was happening.

  When news of Edgecombe’s illness had reached him, brought by me, he had at once felt uneasy. It was no place of Edgecombe’s to appoint an intermediary, however innocent. With the news he had to tell, he himself should have contacted Dolly immediately.

  But of course, said Johnson, Edgecombe had chosen me with a purpose. I had to authenticate the attack. I was there to prove that he really had been poisoned, and once one realized that, one also realized that my life throughout would be sacrosanct.

  The telephoned threat to me he had also found curious, and the odd repetition of words at the night-club and at Coral Harbour. Where I might have reported my findings direct to the hospital or the police, the threats had led me at least to talk to Sir Bartholomew, and had given him a chance to take me into his confidence. They had also given further proof, which I could later vouch for, that Sir Bartholomew’s life was indeed under attack.

  But these had only been vague suspicions until the fire at the Bamboo Conch Club. Then the coincidences, said Johnson, became oddly marked. The club had been Lady Edgecombe’s choice, on her husband’s recommendation. A suitcase of clothes had been stolen, resulting in Johnson’s wearing an outfit of Edgecombe’s. Whether the ensuing fire resulted in death or in injury, the claim could be made that the attack had been intended for Edgecombe.

  ‘But how odd, I thought,’ said Johnson pensively, ‘that the attack had been prepared, and by a resident waiter. What would have happened if Lady Edgecombe had chosen to go to Charley Charley’s? It seemed to me that whoever made that choice of club also knew what was likely to happen there. And afte
r the waiter died, I was also prepared to believe that Sergeant Trotter knew more than he should. At that point,’ went on Johnson’s quiet voice, ‘it seemed quite likely that the assault was intended for me, and that the culprit might be Lady Edgecombe. For example, any man whose family lived on Great Harbour Cay would surely know Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe’s family by sight.’

  I said coldly, ‘Do I gather that when I was sent to stay at their home on the island, you held Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe and his wife in equal suspicion?’

  Johnson was reassuring. ‘But of course you were perfectly safe. You were always perfectly safe: you were the evidence that Edgecombe had been poisoned: you were to be the evidence that he had been grievously assaulted. Nothing was going to happen to you. But I had begun to realize that if I wanted to pursue my suspicions, I ought to stay apart from both of the Edgecombes until the facts, whatever they were, had become plainer. So I remained on Crab Island while Denise drowned her sorrows in drink, and her husband reached the conclusion that drunk, she could no longer be trusted. That was my cardinal error.”

  I remembered. Big Daddy. The only time I had seen Johnson drink more than he could easily carry. I said, ‘Sir Bartholomew killed his own wife?’

  If he remembered at all, there was no trace of sentiment in his manner. ‘I don’t suppose she knew everything,’ Johnson said. ‘But a little too much. Enough to become nervous about all these mysterious accidents: enough to send her to the bottle for comfort. And when she was drunk, she talked. So she became the victim of another of those accidents aimed at Sir Bartholomew.

  ‘The brooch she lost was his anniversary present. Do you remember how he drew attention to it, and got her to put it into her pocket? Brady remembered it clearly. Later, with his arm round her waist, it would have been very easy for him to slip it out and place it just where he wanted. She didn’t struggle when she was pushed over the edge. She made no attempt to run away, nor were her footmarks the deep staggering kind you would expect from someone held against her will, an ether pad over her mouth. She knew who it was. She let him walk her to the edge of the excavation, maybe under the pretext that he had seen her brooch there. He may have embraced her and drugged her while she was in his arms. At any rate, analysis has shown that she was never inside the tarpaulin. It was flung down afterwards, on top of the body.’

  He paused, and added, ‘The little scene after with Edgecombe, which so drastically lowered my ratings, was one I should apologize for. It was extremely necessary to reassure Edgecombe that I had no doubts at all about himself. You helped a lot.’

  I remembered standing there shaking with anger, my hand on Bart Edgecombe’s shoulder. Bart, who had just killed his wife, and Johnson, who suspected it. I had helped everyone, it appeared, but myself.

  Johnson was watching. I drew a long, even breath, and dismissed my emotions. Edgecombe, for his own ends, had warned me about Johnson. Edgecombe had told me that he was married, but not that he was a widower. Edgecombe and Johnson, I had to remember, had been trained in the same school . . ‘So you didn’t suspect Mr Tiko.’ I said. ‘Or Wallace Brady?’

  ‘I suspected everyone,’ Johnson said, in the same even, conversational voice. ‘But Lady Edgecombe was a rather large woman and Mr Tiko is a very small man. Brady was another matter. By the time we got to Crab Island my money was on Trotter for henchman, but I tried the small experiment of the arsenic test papers to see what we would flush. And talking of flushing -’

  I took the reel of tape he handed me in dignified silence. I tried not to imagine the full score for the Polovtsian Dances thundering through the chaste cabins of Dolly. I said frigidly, ‘At any rate, I’m glad it enabled you to see your way clear to beginning your portrait.’

  Johnson glanced at the almond-eyed face on the canvas. ‘I must admit, I deferred it until I was certain I shouldn’t have to end it in Pentonville. Brady was in my view also clean from that moment. He couldn’t have invented that performance. Not really.’

  He sat, obviously thinking humorous thoughts about my all-American suitor. I said pointedly, ‘And did you find the papers you’d lost?”

  ‘In Trotter’s room,’ Johnson said. ‘An interesting outcome, because they were still intact. Which meant either that Trotter was blackmailing a murderer, or that he had pinched them for Bartholomew Edgecombe in case I destroyed them. In which case they would have been discovered safe and sound on some appropriate occasion in the future. Edgecombe, remember, wanted to prove he’d been poisoned. Then he came back from the funeral, and the arsenic papers disappeared from Trotter’s room.’

  ‘Into Edgecombe’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Edgecombe was far too clever for that. No, they vanished. Perhaps he posted them to somewhere in Nassau. We haven’t found them yet, but we will. At the time, it was another petered-out trail. Except that their disappearance on the very day Edgecombe returned seemed coincidental. And since Denise was dead, suspicion was now in fact fairly firmly pinned on Sir Bartholomew himself. Given that, as you can see, the Haven episode made his guilt and Trotter’s complicity very likely indeed. The key point there was that he engineered his own accident to enable him to leave Dolly plausibly. As I told you. I got Brady to mess about with the speedboat, and to suggest that they didn’t come back for you or for Trotter.’

  ‘I wondered,’ I said, ‘how you reached the simple decision to allow Violet of New York off the hook, and not me?’

  Daffodil, stirred by the prospect of high jinks in the bedrooms, had produced a reasonable supper for two. I recall at this moment attempting to fix Johnson’s bifocals with one or both of my eyes, across my daiquiri and chicken with whisky. He merely went on talking, his short-range Ds bent on dissection.

  ‘Violet of New York,’ said Johnson, ‘is a very tough cookie who kept Edgecombe out of mischief, on my orders, for the rest of the day until we arrived. On the other hand, if Bart Edgecombe had your signed arsenic tests, he had no longer quite the need to worry over your health. I thought you would be safer on Dolly.’

  I laid down my knife and fork. ‘But you knew that something was going to happen to Dolly.’

  ‘I know,’ said Johnson. ‘But I also thought that, whatever it was, Trotter would halt it.’

  ‘So the Haven,’ I said, ‘was a dreadful surprise.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to exaggerate,’ said Johnson thoughtfully. ‘Trotter halted it.’

  ‘And went back to shore vowing vengeance on Edgecombe for leaving him. Did Edgecombe in fact intend Trotter to die?’ I asked. ‘Or was it simply your happy suggestion through Brady?’ I realized now why Johnson had had to dive into the sea: why it was so necessary to police what Trotter was doing on Haven.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Johnson said after a moment. ‘I think he meant to get rid of Trotter as in fact he got rid of Pentecost’s friends in the outcome, by running them into a trap. He talked freely of Trotter’s claims as a suspect. I don’t think Edgecombe would have risked a lifetime of blackmail from Trotter: when, with a little care, Trotter might act as his scapegoat. I suppose he got Trotter to help in the first place because of something he knew of Trotter’s past Army career. They were uneasy bedfellows. At any rate, the moment when Edgecombe learned that we weren’t all dead, and saw Trotter glaring at him across his own bedclothes, must have been one of the worst in his life.

  ‘Because this time, the whole thing had happened in public. No one could pretend a boat loaded with explosives and following a radio signal came there by accident. If we’d all died, it wouldn’t have mattered. The story would have involved a runaway boat and an accidental collision. No one need have suspected a thing. But here was a boatload of witnesses, including such a weak vessel as Harry, who was bound to demand that the police be told.

  ‘Trotter made a show of agreeing, and I helped set a deadline of twenty-four hours. To Edgecombe, it would appear that this was all the leeway I thought we could reasonably secure ourselves before the whole thing had to be made public. He would expect me in th
at time to redouble my efforts to trap his would-be assassin. So far as he was concerned, he would know that he had only twenty-four hours in which to engineer my death once and for all. And now. of course, there was no point in an elaborate faking of accidents. It was an affair of murder. The Haven had shown that up clearly. Hence the golf game.’

  I stopped trying to eat. ‘What do you mean, hence the golf game? Mr Tiko finished the jigsaw, that was all. You can’t pretend you foresaw . . .’ I broke off. ‘Or do you have the brazen gall to tell me -’

  ‘The Begum,’ said Johnson apologetically, ‘told me to give her ten minutes.’

  I stared at him. ‘The golf game. She engineered it at your suggestion?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It took fifteen minutes,’ I said viciously. ‘And I nearly said no.’

  ‘Well,’ said Johnson, ‘I’m glad you didn’t. We shipped Edgecombe under sympathetic guard to Great Harbour Cay, where he was out of Trotter’s vengeance-bent reach and I incidentally was safe, out of his; but not before I had planned the Great Trap and put the details before him. He was most enthusiastic and agreed to co-operate by turning up at the right hole at the right time. We left him plenty of time to get hold of Pentecost’s friends or anyone else who took his fancy and arrange to have his empty car shot at or blown up or whatever he pleased.

  ‘Then Spry went along and combed the ground near the fourteenth green until he found the getaway car. He did more. When Trotter arrived at the clubhouse, he told him about it. According to Spry’s story, it was merely a good open car which he had found oddly abandoned. But the chances were that Trotter would know about it, and would realize that it was there for a purpose . . A useless purpose, as it would have turned out. Edgecombe hadn’t told his men that they would be surrounded by police and observers: that this time, in staging an attack on himself, they were to be the victims as well as I.

  ‘At any rate, we got the proof that we wanted. Three of my own private witnesses saw Trotter fire into the bushes between Edgecombe and myself, and saw Edgecombe rise under cover of this fire and, as he thought, successfully kill me. I did a superb Fairbanks fall, and I don’t need to tell you the rest. The police hiding there by the getaway car saw nothing but Trotter’s last stand, in which he succeeded at last in shooting down Edgecombe, the man who knew too much of his past. They saw Trotter kill Edgecombe and try to escape. They saw me shoot at the car and kill Trotter. Poor, insane Trotter. The case is now closed.’